As digital media and electronic device technologies have advanced, digital media has become more accessible than ever before. To illustrate, media content providers may choose to distribute media content over a variety of available distribution channels such as media subscription networks (e.g., subscription television and radio networks), telecommunications networks (e.g., mobile phone networks), the Internet, and other distribution channels. In addition, a person wanting to consume media content has a plethora of available electronic devices to choose from and use to access and consume media content made available over one or more media distribution channels. For example, a person may use a personal computer, television, set-top box, digital video recorder (“DVR”), portable media player (e.g., an mp3 player), mobile phone, tablet computer, e-reader device, and/or other electronic device to access and consume media content.
However, challenges remain in distributing, accessing, and consuming media content. As an example, different electronic devices have different capabilities related to accessing and processing media content. Consequently, it is not uncommon for a user of an electronic device to experience not being able to access and/or consume certain media content because the capabilities of the device are not compatible with the media content. Consequently, users of electronic devices are usually forced to become aware of which types and/or formats of media content can be accessed and processed by their particular electronic devices.
As another example, different content providers provide media content in different formats and in accordance with different content access policies enforced by different digital rights management (“DRM”) technologies. Accordingly, a user of an electronic device may have to deal with a variety of different media content formats, content access policies, and/or DRM technologies when accessing and consuming content. For example, a user may learn that while a particular electronic device is able to access and process media content from a provider, another electronic device may not be equipped to access and process the same media content from the provider due to the format, content access policy, and/or DRM technology associated with the media content. Such experiences may lead some users to spend significant time researching and installing various codecs, media player applications, and/or other media content processing applications onto electronic devices in hopes of expanding the capabilities and/or content access rights of the devices. Unfortunately, such efforts are time consuming, not guaranteed to work or to be implemented correctly, and/or overly complicated for many users.
As another example, a person using multiple electronic devices and/or media networks to access and consume media content is typically required to manually keep track of where the media content is stored (e.g., which of the devices stores which instances of media content) in order to be able to use an appropriate device and/or media network to access and consume the media content. Such manual management of media content can become complicated and even overwhelming for a user who uses various electronic devices and/or media networks to access and consume media content. Moreover, manual management of media content can limit the user's ability to access media content depending on where the media content is stored and which electronic device and/or media network is being used.